Full disclosure: I am a lawyer who taught sixth grade math and science in East Los Angeles for 8 years. I “unretired” in 2011 to represent Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) teachers facing dismissal. All of them are over 40 and at the top of the pay scale and close to vesting lifetime health benefits. Indeed, LAUSD saves as much as $300,000 in future benefits if a teacher is fired before age 55 with 25 years of service. Therefore, I believe they have been targeted not because of the alleged offenses, but because they cost too much.

Anticipating the popular criticism that lawyers protect guilty teachers, I represent my clients pro bono. Therefore, my only potential source of compensation and reimbursement of my expenses is to prevail on behalf of an innocent teacher.

I recently moved to Washington and was not “shocked”, but concerned to learn that the privatization cancer I have documented in Los Angeles appears to have spread nationally. Therefore, I offer the following comment iased on my research into privatization in Los Angeles:

There is a reason Broad is a multi-billionaire – he sees a profit in everything, even public schools. In 1999 he started the Broad Foundation to improve education. He hired two consultants: one, an educator, is an obvious choice. However, “One of the consultants, Dan Katzer, a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, said he views his work as searching out venture capital opportunities in educational innovation.”

In other words, Broad saw the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow not in improving the quality of education, but in creating a new industry in which private, organized for-profit charter sponsors create non-profit charters and suck the lifeblood out of public schools.

Recent studies in Los Angeles reveal that charter schools do not accept (nor are they required to accept) the most severely afflicted disabled children. Unlike LAUSD, charters are not prohibited from suspending or removing disruptive or violent students. (LAUSD is more concerned with getting paid for Average Daily Attendance than with supporting teachers.) Charters also do not have to comply with California state teaching standards nor comply with numerous other laws enacted for the benefit of public school students.

One of the current scandals is that LAUSD has targeted its senior teachers for dismissal (more than 90% of teachers removed from classrooms since 2009 are over 40). But guess who then hires these teachers at half their former pay? Charter schools. Ironically, LAUSD has been sued for failing to assign senior, experienced teachers to inner city schools — the very schools that have targeted this class of teacher for dismissal!

I often ask the rhetorical question: Why would any sane person accept $42,000 per year to be a board member of a $7 billion corporation, i.e., Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)? Further, exactly what kind of expertise do the elected board members possess and what evidence is there that any of the Board members is any more qualified than a parent chosen at random to decide financial issues or other education issues since LAUSD’s $11BILLION current unfunded liabilities clearly reflect gross financial mismanagement.

As in many bloated bureaucracies (LAUSD increased its administrative staff while eliminating teaching positions for lack of funds), the answer lies in the entrenched employees who go along to get along. There is an atmosphere of fear that causes the most conscientious LAUSD administrator to be concerned that if they do not do what is not only explicitly required but implicitly demanded on pain being targeted for dismissal, that they will be next.

It is time for parents, concerned citizens, and, most importantly, tax payers to demand that the promoters of privatization support their claims of “better than public” with evidence.

It would be informative to see the student make-up of those “successful” charters as they are infamous for skimming, pushing out less successful or difficult students and not enrolling second language or special needs students.

I’d also add the effort by reformers to undermine classrooms and de-professionalize the educators. If the billionaires and corporations can successfully demonize teachers to the point the public believes the rhetoric, it is easier to push though the agenda.

With the advent of the so-called information age and digital technology via the internet. “We don’t need no stinkin textbooks.” Establish the goals and objectives, create the lesson plans, select support readings, and use the internet instead of a textbook. Its simple and think of the savings $$$$$. Remember some of the greatest scientists were artist as well. Students should create their own book/portfolio of class work. That way education is more meaningful and the learning process is significantly enhanced.

Many of the folks in our poorest communities, both urban and rural, do not have internet access. Neither do their schools, or if they do, their bandwidth is entirely insufficient. The money needed to change this and then maintain and update systems makes textbooks a good value, as does the fact that reading on a screen and other education based interactions with computers have been shown to be less effective in terms of student outcomes. Technology is no magic bullet, it must never be thought of as anything more than another tool in the toolbox for teachers to use when appropriate. Creating a dependence on tech gives control to the tech companies, not the schools. Curtailing the gouging of school districts by the text book companies would be a great thing as well, further enhancing their value.Tech is great and has its uses, but humans have done a vast array of astonishing things before the transistor and the IC were ever conceived of.

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